Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found by Allegra Huston

plain front and a high rolled collar. The silk, when I touched the cuff, was softly magnetic under my fingertips. He sat on the bed beside me, and laid out the crossword from the newspaper. I loved crosswords, and he loved that I was good at them. Each clue I solved was a rush of warmth, as I felt his pride in me. When Betty came in, also dressed for dinner, he kissed me on the cheek and they went downstairs.
    I could hear the talk floating up from below, then hollow footsteps as people crossed the wood-floored hall to the dining room. I couldn’t sleep; I was too hot with fever. There were the footstepsagain, clattery this time, crossing the marble hall to the drawing room. Then the door opened, and it was Daddy.
    Maybe I was dreaming him. I was amazed that he had remembered me, amazed that he had left the laughing and drinking to come upstairs and sit on my bed again, draw a hand across my clammy forehead and make sure there was a glass of juice beside me. We were in a cocoon, just the two of us: in this high, dark, quiet space. Did they notice, downstairs, that he wasn’t there? Of course they must. But no one would guess that he was here in the Bhutan Room, with me.
     
    A few months later, just as suddenly, Nurse and I were moved back into the Little House. Talk of selling vanished. All was back to normal. When school finished, I packed my blue suitcase again—the one that went with me everywhere, which had my initials, A.H., stenciled on it in white—and we went back to Nana and Grampa’s house for the summer. I left my treasure chest behind.

6
    G rampa’s restaurant was in a brownstone at 150 East Fifty-fifth Street, with an awning over the sidewalk reading, in cursive script, Tony and Tony’s Wife. I thought it was insulting—but characteristic of Grampa—that he had a name and Nana didn’t. I’ve since learned that it was originally just called Tony’s Wife, and was a spin-off of Grampa’s first restaurant, Tony’s. When they closed the first one, they merged the names.
    I imagine Nana at the time she married Grampa. It was during Prohibition, and the restaurant was a speakeasy; he had two motherless children, officials to charm, policemen to bribe, and liquor to hide. Scottish as she was, Nana was swept off her feet by Grampa’s swashbuckling canniness, along with her own maternal instincts. It was a strange marriage; not devoid of affection, but marked by emotional and physical cruelty.
    In his letters to Mum, Grampa swings between contempt for Nana and dependence on her. In his eyes, she existed either to enable his glory or as a drag on it. She, not surprisingly, was prone to depression, and turned to Mum as an ally. She told Mum about going in front of some city board for a liquor license and being asked if she’d ever been convicted of a crime. “Marrying Tony Soma,” she answered, which made the liquor-board guys laugh. It made me laugh too—until I sensed Mum’s silently pleading misery at being caught in the battle between her father and her stepmother: on one side, blood, the man to whom she owed everything, and on the other, no blood, but the only mother love she’d consciously known.
    There was never any question of Nana leaving her life with Grampa, and by the time I knew her, she’d carved out her own space. I liked seeing her in the city, being served a solitary, queenly dinner at the round table in “Nana’s sitting room” on the first floor above the restaurant by a waiter in formal jacket and bow tie. It was only when I saw the waiter bowing slightly as he set the plate in front of her, shaking out her napkin for her, that I realized that I didn’t like how Grampa treated her. Grampa saw himself as an unusually wise and spiritually evolved being, and, so very pleased with himself, he considered himself above the demands of common kindness. I didn’t buy it.
    No one said it, but I got the idea that Grampa hated Daddy. I picture the two of them as chimpanzees tussling over